Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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Of course, the Deputy is correct. We have not seen the emissions reductions that were planned. An advantage is that there has not been a stop-start approach since the 2019 plan. At the time, I recognised that was the right approach and I commended the Minister on the aims and broad means. With the new updated plan, we have increased the ambition. There is a certain advantage in that there is no change in signals to, say, the public service, the business community or householders. It is a big capital transition and the last thing that is needed is uncertainty. The cross-party approach to these plans and the consistency as we iterate from one plan to the other is an important part of getting it right. However, the Deputy is right. Transport, as I think I said, is the hardest. Electric vehicles will be only one part of it. The second major part is the modal shift to active travel and to public transport. That will require difficult decisions on the allocation of road space and the allocation of the national capital plan at the budget. That is starting in the national development plan. More than anything, it is about the political difficulty in making it safe to walk and cycle on our roads and giving the time priority and traffic light priority to buses so that they get through the cities, towns and, indeed, rural Ireland, quicker. That is down to thousands of individual decisions among councils right across the country. Critical to this delivery on transport is that the local authority climate action plans marry what we are doing in the national plans.

A third area, which is probably getting more complex, is demand reduction. Since forever, success in transport planning was when more and more transport was being generated.

Now, however, we have an opportunity, particularly with remote working owing to Covid and the 15-minute city or town concept that we are starting to see work well in other cities, to reverse what has been a 50-year pattern of ever-lengthening commutes. Availing of the opportunity would improve our quality of life and, in the end, our economy. There would be a stronger local economy. It is a question of demand reduction. The most difficult parts are the freight, maritime and aviation aspects. In this regard, we will require international effort. If members attended any of the presentations or side events in Glasgow, they, like me, will have heard about Volvo and Scania trucks going green. I heard about plans to switch to new fuels in the maritime and aviation sectors.

On the building sector, Deputy Whitmore is right about the availability of skills. We need about 27,000 skilled workers, including craftspeople, carpenters, electricians, plumbers and energy experts. That is why the action plan connected to the climate action plan, the action plan for apprenticeships up to 2025, involves a five-year strategy to double the number of apprenticeships. This is probably one of the top priorities of the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris. We have to double the overall number of apprenticeship registrations to 10,000. Critical in this regard was the recent integration of much of the apprenticeship system into the CAO. Much of the problem is a cultural one in that younger people are getting a variety of signals in from society in different ways indicating careers based on apprenticeships are not high status or high earning. Nothing could be further from the truth: the careers are the most secure, the most urgently needed and, in many ways, the most rewarding possible. They involve fixing people's homes and making them much more comfortable to live in. People in this area are the front-line heroes in the climate crisis. We need to depict it that way to get our younger people to switch over.

We need to be careful about this year's numbers because Covid killed retrofitting this year. For the first five months of the year, one could not go into to someone's home. The budget in local authorities for next year is significant, however, and will allow a rapid scaling up. Similarly, the national retrofitting plan, which will be launched shortly and will contain a range of measures including one-stop shops, low-cost lending, grants, and financing at a huge scale. Financing is not going to be the difficulty on the grant side; it will be a question of cultural status and making it easier to do the right thing through really good advice and financial support. We may surprise ourselves such that when we have year-round contracting without stoppages associated with Covid, it will take off. We have the key measures in place. Probably the most important is getting the apprentices trained and working. While this may have been slow to start because of Covid, it will ramp up now. I believe we will deliver on it.